Unable to install Acrobat Patch 9.2 on Mac

[JatinderPal_Singh]

Case ID: 181226045

Customer is unable to install the Patch 9.2 for Acrobat 9.

Following are notes from customer:

Downloaded 9.2 patch. When attempting to install, message box said original software had been altered in some way and that patch cou
ldn't be installed. I have no idea how software was altered.  Works fine right now. Would prefer not to have to reinstall.

OS is Snow Leopard
Operating System: Macintosh
Has it ever worked? If so, what's changed? (provide comments in description field): Not Applicable
Same results with different file?: Not Applicable
Same results with different computer?: No
Recent System Hardware or Software change?: Yes

[Stuart_Haiz]

I'd really like to see Adobe offer this as a complete download or free disc available to registered users. I don't think under the circumstances (those circumstances being Adobe's admission of liability regarding having potentially compromised our security) that we should be expected to pay a bean for this 'working' updater/installer.

[T_Clayton]

Thanks.  I PM'd you my email address.

If you troubleshoot this problem offline with some of the other users, please post any solutions you find back to this thread.

Thanks,

Todd

[Joel Blum]

As for a full 9.2 installer, I'd agree that this would make things easier in these circumstances, but such an installer simply does not exist for the full Acrobat product.

But wouldn't it be simpler for Adobe to CREATE such an installer than to muck around trying to find a solution (or individual solutions) for those users who can't apply the upgrade patch?

This seems like a no-brainer to me.

[monstrodude]

Joel:

Your point is well taken and quite logical.  However, logic has no place where corporate profits are concerned and the bottomline is the bottomline.

Why pull engineers off developing the next version which will make lots of $$$ as opposed to fixing a flawed crappy installer protocol that will cost lots of money..pretty much a no brainer for a "We could give a flying hoot about you" type of company that Adobe seems to have become.

[hawz]

Joel, David

Please bear with us whilst we continue to look at the different options to solve this for users affected by this error.

We would still be very interested in troubleshooting this, because we have not been able to reproduce this internally and getting a clearer understanding of what may be happening would obviously help us in trying to prevent such issues in the future.  I will most certainly keep you informed should there be any new insights or developments on the above.

David, in terms of how that would work from a practical point of view, we'd be looking along the lines of previous attempts by Kirsten to narrow this down (getting log files etc), which should be easier now you are no longer hampered by permissions problems on your system. If you'd be willing to spend some more time with us on this, I'd greatly appreciate it, although I would fully understand if you'd be reluctant to spend any more time on this. Either way, feel free to let me know.

Thanks again.

Henk

[Joel Blum]

Henk,

I've been happy to do my part by supplying information in the past to help you resolve this issue, and I assume since you haven't asked for them again that the files I supplied earlier to Craig Schimp are already in your possession.

But since I sent those files (quite awhile back), I've upgraded my OS to 10.6.2 from 10.5.8 and I still can't run your patch. (My Macbook Pro has also had a keyboard and hard drive repair and who knows how many other small software changes, font installations, etc.)

If you take off your Adobe programmer hat for a moment and replace it with an end-user hat and look at it from our point of view, you might understand our bafflement:

1) The handful of people posting to this thread must represent only an extremely small fraction of your users with this problem, seeing as to find one's way here requires a strong desire to end the annoyance with more effort than simply dismissing Updater's error dialogue, a certain amount of technical savvy, a strong dependence on Acrobat Professional in their work, and no small amount of detective work to find this thread.

2) Everyone's system configurations seem to be different and, according to Craig's previous correspondence, Updater's logs seem to indicate different reasons for its failure and/or different points at which Updater fails. The only thing we all seem to have in common is that we are Mac users who own Adobe Acrobat.

3) My original Acrobat Pro installation was in July 2009 when I upgraded from CS3 to CS4 (and I believe CS4 was available many months earlier than that), and I can't recall what version of Acrobat was included or how many patches Adobe has asked me to install since then. But what if a customer were to buy CS4 today? Would s/he be receiving the same version as when CS4 was originally released and then be asked to run a lot of little patches? Or are you selling a more recent, working version of the program? If new CS4 (or Acrobat-only) customers can expect to buy a working version of your product, why is the same not available to your existing customers?

From where we sit (wearing our grumpy, end-user hats), the logical solution -- not just for those of use who found this thread but for all Acrobat customers -- is to expect a simple error-free installer of the latest Acrobat release.

It is Adobe's problem to solve. It makes no sense to us users that you can't repeat a widespread problem in-house, and it feels like you're grasping at straws when you request logs and hardware/system configuration information that are demonstrated not to point to any commonality -- rather, it feels like just a further waste of time to resolve something that as Adobe customers should have been a five-minute interruption of our workday to run a minor upgrade you supplied months ago.

[Sandee Cohen]

Henk,

Many people on the Acrobat team know me.

And they know I am more than willing to go out of my way to help Adobe.

Over the past twenty years, I have spent countless hours trouble-shooting problems with many different Adobe and Macromedia beta software (including older versions on Acrobat).

If someone wants, I am willing to sit in an Acrobat Connect session and let someone control my machine and watch what happens during the install.

But the fact that no one has contacted us except to request log files (over two months ago!) and then tells us that you are unable to replicate the problem internally leads me to believe this is NOT a high priority. You have the Connect technology to examine our machines. But no one does anything!

Look at how many views this thread has. Over 7,300! It is one of the most viewed topics in the forum. And I would dare suggest that you can easily extrapolate that number to be about 73,000 users (times 10) who actually have the same problem.

So rather than consider this a minor problem, you might consider it more pervasive.

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered,-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

[Phillip_M_Jones]

Although mine is updated to 9.20 I was unable to through the updater. I alway repair/check permissions befor or after an install and usuall check them once every day or two any way.

My system is OSX.4.11 so the problem is not just related to X.5 and X.6.

I was able to download an updater from Adobe site and and make the update. Please don't get the false assuption that if its downloaded from site instead of updated through updater it will work. It worked just for me (note they are in actual .log format):

[monstrodude]

Hi Henk:

Thanks for the email back.  After repairing my permissions, I already followed the troubleshooting instructions from the last Adobe employee and achieved the same fruitless results.  Unless you have a detailed and well thought out approach with real vision for this situation, I simply don't have time for further time wasting.  4 months is enough.  Kristen has my logs post permissions fix.

Aloha, David Talisman

[Kirsten_Reshatoff]

Hi David,

I'm sorry but I did not receive any log files from you recently.

-Kirsten

[monstrodude]

Hi Kirsten:

Been too long since we connected.  I run a software company myself and get paid $150 p/h to develop/betatest etc.  I've made enough of a contribution to Adobe's beta testing resources.  Further investigation will require payment to my company.

Please let me know when Adobe has an installer that simply works.  Short of that, I do not care to further participate in these extravagant techno

dead ends. of flawed installer software.

Aloha, David

[Sandee Cohen]

I have my Acrobat set to look for updates every so often. Today was one of those days.

And just like it has been since October, the update failed.

I have given up on ever seeing 9.2. I suspect Acrobat 10 will be out before I can update 9.2.

<sigh>

[monstrodude]

same here..Adobe is simply useless.

David

[T_Clayton]

I was able to finally install 9.2 (and subsequently 9.3).  It took uninstalling and reinstalling a couple of times.  I am not sure if it took a couple of times because I missed something on the first manual uninstall or if I inadvertently did something the second time which made the process work.  These steps worked for me on my 10.6.2 install of OS X.

Here are the steps I followed:

0. Back up everything.  I am not responsible if something that shouldn't be deleted gets deleted... This worked for me and I'm not promising this will work for you and be correct.

1.  Run the Acrobat uninstaller if it works for you.  This didn't work for me on the first attempt but after manually removing and then reinstalling I was able to run it for the second attempt.

2. Either manually remove these files or validate that they were removed by the uninstaller (not all of these files may exist on your system):

- Applications Folder:

/Applications/Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro

  containing the following three apps:

   - Acrobat Distiller.app

   - Acrobat Uninstaller.app

   - Adobe Acrobat Pro.app

- System Library Folder:

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PDF

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/de_DE/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/fr_FR/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/zh_CN/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/zh_TW/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/es_ES/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/it_IT/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/nl_NL/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/ja_JP/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/ko_KR/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/nb_NO/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/pt_BR/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/da_DK/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/fi_FI/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/sv_SE/Acrobat Pro

/Library/Automator/Save As Adobe PDF.action

/Library/Automator/PDFtoAdobePDF.action

/Library/Caches/Acrobat

/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

/Library/PDF Services/Save as Adobe PDF.app

/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.pdfviewer.plist

/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.PDFAdminSettings

/Library/Printers/PPD Plugins/AdobePDFPDE900.plugin

/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/ADPDF9.PPD

/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/ja.lproj/ADPDF9J.PPD

/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/ko.lproj/ADPDF9K.PPD

/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/zh_CN.lproj/ADPDF9CS.PPD

/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/zh_TW.lproj/ADPDF9CT.PPD

- /usr Folder

/usr/libexec/cups/backend/pdf900

- Home Library Folder (Note the tilde means that these are in your home folder):

~/Library/Application SupportAdobe:Acrobat

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PDF

~/Library/Caches/Acrobat

~/Library/Caches/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro

~/Library/Logs/Adobe/Acrobat

~/Library/Preferences/Acrobat

~/Library/Preferences/Acrobat Distiller Prefs

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.print.AdobePDF9

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.90.sh.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro_x86_9.0.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro9.0.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.automator.SaveasAdobePDF.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro_ppc_9.0.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat9.0.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.distiller.plist

~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.distiller9.plist

~/Library/Receipts/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro

~/Library/Receipts/com.adobe.distiller

I repaired permissions and restarted here, but that's probably not necessary.

3.  Install Acrobat Pro 9.0.0

4.  Launch Acrobat Pro and go to Help -> Repair Acrobat Installation

5.  Install 9.1.0

6.  Launch Acrobat Pro and go to Help -> Repair Acrobat Installation

7.  Install 9.1.1

8.  Launch Acrobat Pro and go to Help -> Repair Acrobat Installation

9.  Install 9.1.2

10. Launch Acrobat Pro and go to Help -> Repair Acrobat Installation

11. Install 9.1.3

12. Launch Acrobat Pro and go to Help -> Repair Acrobat Installation

13. Install 9.2 <-- Hopefully this works

14. Launch Acrobat Pro and go to Help -> Repair Acrobat Installation

15. Install 9.3

16. Launch Acrobat Pro <-- Hopefully you're up to date now

I launched Acrobat after each patch install since it seemed to "fix" things when launched.  I have no idea if this is needed.

All the patch installers can be downloaded here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Macintosh

If you are willing to go through the process this worked for me.  Since 9.3 is still an incremental installer and doesn't contain any fixes for the installer issue, it looks like there won't be a cumulative installer that would simplify this process any time soon.  While it greatly surprises me that a new customer has to go through a massive update process when purchasing Acrobat Pro at this point, it looks like this is the way it is going to be.  So, continuing to complain about it appears fruitless.

I hope this helps.

Todd

[Joseph_A__M_]

I got this error. Started when the Adobe PDF printer was paused and I clicked to continue and all my printers (local too) disappeared.  I re-installed Acrobat (was at 9.3; have 9.0 CS4 Master Collection disk) trying to get my .pdf printer back. Errored on install but Acrobat opened fine. Got the modified, plugin disabled error on updates even after repair.  Removed, re-installed again. At end of re-install got error, went into help, support on the install error. Followed links to install Adobe Support Advisor.  Went on to install updates, never launching until all updates ran fine.

[modern-i]

FYI: I've successfully installed Acrobat Patch 9.3.0 on Mac OSX 10.5.8. This after my disastrous failure with 9.2.0, which required me to reinstall the entire CS4 Suite. Thereafter I stayed with Acrobat 9.0 and refrained from updating at all until this week. Updated to 9.3.0 straight from 9.0.0 without incident. And no need for intermediary downloads as before. What a relief! Maybe Adobe fixed something after all.... and/or maybe you need to go back to 9.0 for this latest update to work. I'm posting this just in case it may help others still struggling with this issue. Best of luck!

[Stuart_Haiz]

I too was able to download and successfully install 9.3. Also, updated successfully to 9.3.1.

However, I was not faced with optional components screen (point 7) or points 8 and 9. I did have to manually uninstall but I'm not aware of missing any of the files to delete.

It even managed to retain my Flatten Pages script so it seems there is some other part of the system that holds a link to Acrobat.

[Hank_61]

After all, I can say that the new complete 9.3 installer (not: updater) offered by Adobe is working for me, inkl. 9.3.1 update. I really hope the story is at a positive end now ...

[TxnDesign99]

Can anyone post a link to the "9.3 installer"? All I am able to find is the update. I realize this thread is quite old, and apparently, most users have gotten past this update -- my desktop updated fine, but macbook air, no... same version: 10.6.7

[Stuart_Haiz]

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Macintosh

Pleased to see the 9.2 > 9.3 is no longer buggy!

/* Sorry - just realised this is the link to the update */

[rogier_]

After trying numerous suggestions to no avail I finaly managed to update my Acrobat 9 Pro to 9.4.4 on OS10.6.7 MPB unibody. As far as I know I have not seen this solution desrcibed yet. This was my Modus Operandi:

1. Repaired disk permissions with Disk Utility
2. Copied Adobe Acrobat Pro.app to a different directory, ~Users/username/Downloads in my case.
3. Again repaired disk permissions
4. Downloaded each sequential update and applied them to the app in my Downloads folder.
5. Replaced Adobe Acrobat Pro.app in ~Applications with the one from my Downloads folder.

As I tried numerous other approaches I had already binned AUMProduct.aup from Contents/Resources/AMT from Adobe Acrobat Pro.app (by right clicking Show Package Contents in Finder).